Dave Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity

Jack's mom asked Hand to check on her husband – he'd been gone twenty minutes. Hand did and came back with him and whispered to me that he'd found Jack's dad kneeling by the trunk of the car, his hands over his head, on the hood, and Hand had stood above him for a minute or two before Jack's dad had noticed he was there. Hand was telling me this and I was listening but was looking at a picture over his shoulder, one of a hundred in the hallway, all from the local arts center, watercolors by amateurs. The one behind Hand was a blood orange with a knife through it.

Jack had been conscious when they brought him in. It was midnight and we were alone with Jack's mom in the cafeteria and she told us. She was eating a banana and told us while chewing. She had such small eyes, lidless, slits cut from her face. Her forehead was lined heavily, the skin thick, the wrinkles like knife-cuts into clay. We loved her but now felt betrayed. She hadn't told us this sooner and she wasn't doing anything about anything. I was jealous of the paramedics. I wanted to punch them in the stomach and then stand over them, with my feet on their chests, and demand to know what he said. What did he say? Jack's mom didn't know. He was incoherent. Which was it, conscious or incoherent? Idiot mom. She was gone. Useless. Everyone had already given up. Jesus Christ, no one knew what they were doing. She went back upstairs.

"She's worthless," Hand said. He was right. The father was huddled in a blanket in the waiting room and the mother was eating a banana.

He was conscious when he came in. Goddammit, people, no one's conscious when they come in and then – You can't let go when someone's conscious when they motherfucking come in. What were the chances that the doctors of Fond du Lac had any idea what they were doing? No chance. Jack's parents were waiting for the doctors to do something. There was no time to wait. What the fuck were they doing?

"We should find those guys," Hand said. Outside the cafeteria, we used the payphone and yellow pages to call the private ambulance companies. No one would tell us anything, the fuckers – wouldn't tell us if they had or hadn't picked him up. We decided we didn't need to know what he'd said. We'd find out later but for now it didn't matter. We had secret meetings in the parking lot, Hand and I, kicking rocks and pulling branches from trees. Back in the hospital, Hand chased a doctor into the elevator and grilled her. Hand wanted to know more about the prognosis and treatment. No one would talk to us.

"They fucked up," he said to me. "They fucked up and they're hiding something."

"What'd she say?"

"Nothing. Which proves it." The doctors knew more than they were telling us, and Hand was sure they could be doing more. They'd messed up and were covering it up. If he was conscious when he came in, he should be fine, Hand said. I agreed. He was conscious! They'd done something wrong.

Hand went to the twenty-four-hour Walgreen's and came back, walking briskly down the corridor, nodding, squinting, ready.

"What is that?" I asked.

"You know what it is," he said, pulling from the bag a minicassette recorder. I knew what he wanted to do.

"You're not gonna get anything if they know they're being taped," I said.

"I know that," he said, and then showed me the rest of the contents of the bag – a notebook, a bunch of bags of peanuts, a roll of white serrated medical tape and an ace bandage. "They won't know," he said.

In the bathroom Hand held the tape recorder against his stomach while I taped in on with the medical tape and then wrapped the bandage around his torso to keep it in place. The doctors who'd fucked up would go to jail. Or the paramedics. They'd be sued for billions. They'd be ruined. He wore the apparatus for the next six hours. The button on the top right side of the machine had to be pushed to record. He would pretend to sneeze, turn away and push the button. It would work.

But I didn't think it would work. The door was closed to the room where Jack was and I didn't know our next move. Every second we could have done something and we were waiting. We too were waiting. We were standing, blinking, waiting. We were thinking of things to do with our hands while we waited. Everyone was waiting. Only intermittently did the world give us tasks, in quick beautiful bursts, that we had to complete and feel electric and roaring while doing so. But here now we needed to act because only we could fix this. We couldn't do fucking anything. You come upon a store that's just closed. You see the lights on, you see the people still in there, putting things away, and you turn away, because a sign has told you to turn around. We're so easily thwarted. We're all weak and cowardly. But I want to pound the windows, to break the glass and thrust my hand in and turn the knob and let myself in.

Hand taped conversations with nurses and orderlies, getting closer to the doctors. When he filled one side of the tape, we went back into the bathroom and unwrapped him and switched the tape's side, and wrapped him back up.

"You gotten anything good yet?"

"Not quite, but I'm getting damned close. Everyone's scared. They're scared to death."

– Lord God, don't you think I could use these things against you? Don't you know that what you can do, I can do? Don't you know that I can summon your own winds, move the plates of this earth, just as you do? This earth is not yours; it's ours. Don't you fucking know this? Why do you play with us when you know I will do the same, and worse, to you? I will bring the winds of your world to bear against you. I will take your winds and twist them and throw them to you. I will mix them with your oceans, I will wrench them together and send them up to you and watch you drown in screaming waters of the blood and bones of your favorites. Look at you. Look at you! You all hairless and white with eyes burning black and red – what makes you so sure I won't hurt you the same way? What makes you so sure? I can take your skies and rip them in great swaths and crumple them, swallow them, turn them to fire. What makes you think I won't stalk you to the corners of the earth and make you pay for this? What makes you so sure that I won't bring it all back to you? I shall have waters of blood cast you away! I will sit upon the mount and send judgment down upon you. You shall cleave to my house! Therefore shall evil come upon thee; and mischief shall fall upon thee; thou shalt not be able to put it off: and desolation shall come upon thee suddenly, which thou shalt not know! And what shall ye say in the day of visitation, and in the desolation which shall come from below? To whom will ye flee for help? And where will ye have your glory? – Oh Lord I am spinning and wet – I will forgive you everything before if you allow us this, if you allow us this. If you should allow us this, if you should invest us with the necessary strength and then clear our path, so shall I honor thee and praise thee across the earth. But if thee shall take him away I will know vengeance -

"I've got an idea," Hand said. "Get off the floor." Hand had been on the phone, with a few of his medical acquaintances in St. Louis and found a place in Mexico that did experimental spinal cord surgery.

"Where?"

"Chiapas."

"No."

"I swear."

The vertebrae would be replaced by ceramics made from molds of the originals, and the spinal cord would be frozen first – Hand said hypothermal shock treatment - making it more accepting of treatment, to peripheral nerve grafts -

"Insurance isn't going to pay for that kind of thing," I said. I was standing again now, and we were next to the blood orange painting. The painter of that orange was a lunatic.

"So? You have money," Hand said.

I did. I did! I was thrilled with the idea of using it now. I'll use that godforsaken money! I could use that money. The money had a purpose. I felt a divine order that I'd never known before. This was why I had been given the money. It all made sense. Of course it makes sense! There is order! A lightbulb, a windfall, now this.